On the contrary, in 1982, Dom Bernard Orchard, O.S.B., alerted Catholics to the dangers of false scholarship, as English scholar John Beaumont has recalled in an article (“Kulturkampf and the Gospel”) in “Culture Wars”, Dec 1996:
“In practice, this has meant that they deny that the Apostle St. Matthew could have published his own Gospel; and
this, in turn, amounts to saying that all the Church Fathers and early Councils erred on a matter of fact in saying St. Matthew wrote his own Gospel. In other words, the modern biblical ‘authorities’ are committed to denying that the Church has accurately transmitted the true tradition regarding the authorship of the Gospels.”
It is generally accepted by scholars that Luke and Matthew used the works of Mark and Q as sources for their gospels. Likewise, it is generally accepted that all three gospels were written originally in Greek, with the possibility of Aramaic as well. The authors of the book
Understanding the Difficult Words of Jesus, in their research, show that those positions may not be right.
Bivin and Blizzard relate research by Dr. Robert L. Lindsey as to the history of the synoptic gospels. Within five years after the death of Jesus, a biographer (believed to be Matthew) recorded the story of Jesus in Hebrew. At once, there was a demand in the Greek-speaking churches for a translation of the biography into Greek. A very literal translation was made. A few years later, stories and parts of stories were removed and arranged topically. Shortly after, a Greek author tried to reconstruct the story. Luke used the latter two of these records as his sources. Mark used Luke’s work and the topically-arranged Greek as his sources. Matthew used Mark’s work and the topically-arranged Greek as his sources. The current gospel may have been written by someone other than the Matthew who is believed to have written the original biography.
Thus, if this is correct, the original writing was composed in Hebrew, not Greek, or even Aramaic. The authors, throughout their book, present evidence to support their position. Statistics are quoted to show that over 90% of the Bible, including Old Testament quotes in the New Testament, was written in Hebrew, with about 1% in Aramaic, and the rest in Greek. If Bivin and Blizzard are right, there needs to be a change in thinking about the origin of the synoptic gospels and the resultant translations.
They quote from Eusebius in Ecclesiastical History, giving evidence that it was known in his day that Matthew wrote his Gospel in Hebrew. Eusebius himself had quoted other writers, Papias (Book III, Chapter 39, page 127), Irenæus (Book V, Chapter 8, page 187), Origen (Book VI, Chapter 25, page 245), and Eusebius himself (Book III, Chapter 24, page 108).
ewtn.com/library/SCRIPTUR/NEWBOOK.TXT
Then, Thetazlord in #110 asks again what he has asked multiple times: “how” can these UNbaptized people enter Heaven without being baptized in water, while admitting over and over that he was formerly a “Catholic”.
The question he refuses to face is why Jesus should found His own Church on St Peter as His Chief Vicar with the other Apostles with the power and His authority for “teaching them to observe all things I have commanded you…” [Matt 28:20], while he chooses to ignore Christ and His Church teaching through Christ’s Magisterium, for his own feelings, ignoring still that “Every man who is ignorant of the Gospel of Christ and of his Church, but seeks the truth and does the will of God in accordance with his understanding of it, can be saved. It may be supposed that such persons would have desired Baptism explicitly if they had known its necessity.” [CCC #1260].